The Bold Girls Ken campaigners at the launch of their campaign at the Perth Museum in 2023.
Bold Girls Ken is a youth-led campaign on consent, delivered as part of the Young Women Know project by The Young Women’s Movement and NSPCC Scotland. The campaign aims to help young people understand what consent is and what it looks like – on and offline.Â
The Campaign
Designed to tackle unhealthy relationships and peer sexual abuse through peer-led campaigns, and building upon the work of their Young Women Know ‘Our Fierce Girls’ group, the Bold Girls Ken group researched, developed and co-designed a bank of resources and toolkits for young people and practitioners to facilitate and support conversations around healthy relationships, consent and reporting, creating safe spaces for young people and guidance for teaching consent.  Â
The Bold Girls Ken campaigners with NSPCC Scotland and The Young Women’s Movement at the launch of their campaign at the Perth Museum in 2023.
I’m thrilled that the Bold Girls Ken campaign has been shortlisted for a Sheila McKechnie Foundation award. Young Women Know was created after our investigation into sexual harassment in Scottish schools in 2018, which found that 91% of girls felt that sexual harassment and gender-based bullying were problems at their school, and the NSPCC Helpline report ‘Is this abuse’ which found that 9 times as many girls as boys contacted Childline for support. The young women who led this campaign showed great courage and tenacity in doing so, and are hugely deserving of this recognition.”
Jenni Snell
CEO of The Young Women’s MovementÂ
The Change
The campaign, developed and co-designed by the Bold Girls Ken group and the Young Women Know project, has reached over 9,000 people to date through social media activity and has been shared with all secondary schools across Scotland, over 1000 organisations and services and over 200 people through events, speaking opportunities and workshops.
Their campaign has been presented in spaces of influence to decision makers including Scottish Parliament. Bold Girl Ken members have taken the opportunity to present their campaign at events and webinars, sharing the co-designed resources and toolkits with teachers, youth workers and young people across Scotland and they have been included on the RSHP Scot website.
The campaign received a lot of media interest and interviews were led by the young women. Bold Girls Ken members have developed leadership skills that they can lean into, and have created real, impactful change for many young women on a national level.Â
The Future
Bold Girls Ken are excited to step into the next phase of their Young Women Know project. The focus of this year’s work is to support four groups of young women, aged 16-18yrs in schools and community settings, to explore prevention-based content including online safety, consent and reporting, AI imagery and videography and online misogyny.
They will be supported by The Young Women’s Movement and a young woman content creator to develop and co-design videos for a social media campaign to aid young women’s understanding of healthy relationships, consent and safety, and empower them to reject all forms of violence against them.
The co-designed videos will be shared through a webinar, their website, social media and newsletters to reach wider groups of young people, including boys and young men and provide participants with a meaningful platform to have their voices heard on the topic of VAWG prevention.Â
Who else was involved?
NSPCC Scotland, Bertha Park High School, Crieff High School, Perth College, and Perth and Kinross CouncilÂ
